Chris-Aldin's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Saint - Chapter 2]

Very interesting.

Im already thinking how cool this story could become later on. Its already intruiging right now, but i can feel many exciting or tense times in future chapters. This also seems quite professionally done in terms of its story, so far in my opinion i would say this could pass as a well known writers introduction! Here is my review.

The graphics were very good. Truthfully i cant really pick out what it is exactly but theres something that took away from them slightly, which is why i gave a 9. The colours usually fit in well, but they didnt necessarily stand out. The characters' appearances were all pretty good, i liked how no one character looked similar to another. I noticed there was a lot of detail in the backgrounds, it shows you put a lot of effort into them. The effects you used such as shading and the rain really helped out in this case. The style was great, and it will only get better as the story progresses. Maybe for the introduction episodes there was just a little too much narration and not quite enough actual movements in the animation. This method was still used well to get the story across nicely. Im hoping in the next episode there is some dialogue between the characters and a little bit more animation, but see if you can keep some of the narration in. The sound was great too, there werent many sound effects, i personally dont recall any. But since the style of these first two movies have been mostly narration that didnt matter too much. The narrator's voice was good and same with the music playing in the background throughout.

So overall this was a very good submission and i just cant wait to see what comes of this series. Please keep the quality of each chapter high!
-Two Thumbs Way Up! 4.5/5

[FPS In Real Life]

Solid!

This was actually quite good. Believe it or not but me and the rest of X_Aldin Productions have been making Real Life FPS for quite some time, and we still think this is very well made. Its also good to see more artists use a generally unheard of style to make their movies. Here is my review.

The visuals are just about as good as they can get in a Real Life FPS movie. The many flash special effects that you added in are something X_Aldin hasnt done very much of yet, as we are not "flash" artists. But they really worked out, i couldnt help but notice the blood right off the bat. We got some comments before saying that we should add it in. Based on some of the comments you guys received, they didnt like the blood. All the things such as the health bar, the ammo counter, and the periodic Duke Nukem quotes all worked REALLY well. The style was excellent. I would love to see this style become a bit more used in the future. This FPS was a little different than our movies because it was more of an actual flash movie than our stuff is. It was a bit longer too than our average, i dont quite know how you managed so many sound effects and effects in this with that filesize, nice work. The sound was great, there were sound effects for everything, along with some good voice clips, and a solid song playing in the background. The footsteps really worked out, i liked how they actually changed depending on what kind of floor you were walknig on. However, i think the gunshot could have been more powerful sounding. This even had a little humour, we try to put some in our own movies once in a while.

So overall this was a very well made Real Life FPS, and i was certainly excited to first see this. It was good in every way pretty much, you even had a very nice house to work with! I want to talk to you further about Real Life FPS if possible, so just e-mail X_Aldin productions or just leave a private message in the inbox. Thanks a bunch, and congrats on a great movie.
-Two Thumbs Up! 4/5

Aerdail responds:

Excellent review, thank you so much for the critism and support, I hope to talk to you more in the future.

[Animator vs. Animation]

Very nicely done.

I must say i really enjoyed this. I can see why the score is so high, even if it wont stay there. It was one of the awesome submissions we received the past week, and congrats on winning those awards. Here is my review.

The visuals were excellent. They were nearly perfect, its just the characters werent really detailed as they could have been and the backgrounds were just a little blurry. Everything else about them was great. They were simple where they needed to be and certainly charming. The animation was also really smooth throughout.
The style deserves either a 9 or a 10 from everybody, thanks to the sheer originality of this and how well it was done. I have never seen another animation where the characters battle against the cursor in an action packed movie. Just really great presentation and idea for this aspect. The sound was good. The sounds in the movie may have been a little too simplistic in a way, and more could have been useful. Maybe a small tune playing could have helped as well. But the sound effects that you did have were pretty funny and were certainly insync.

Overall this was a great movie and i hope to see more from you this good. Keep at it and please keep submitting!
-Two Thumbs Way Up! 5/5

[Flash Comedy Extravaganza]

Absolutely comical!

This was great in pretty much every way i can think of. This is an improvement over your first submission here. It was really original and fun the whole way through. Here is my review.

The graphics were definitely some of your best so far. All your characters were nicely done and some of them had something of your own with them, such as Mario and Luigi's light bristles. The actual animation part of the visuals was very important as they needed to much of the humour. The style was awesome too, i always like submissions that can combine a whole bunch of little clips and make them all funny for different reasons. The animating style was good because it made even the stick characters look good in one way or another. The sound was great too, the parts where the sound quality dropped were hilarious, and the rest of the voices could fit in any better. Great choices of music and everything.

Overall this was an awesome submission that is certainly worth watching, if you didnt love the humour in this you will like something else. Keep it up!
-Standing Ovation 5/5

[XIN Session 17]

Excellent pre-final session!

Fantastic work on yet another session. I dont know if this one is quite my favourite thus far, but it was still quite good and served its purpose perfectly. It demonstrated to the viewers how the last episode was going to end up. It nearly concluded the story and now all the final fights and side plots are set up. On top of this everything that has been done well in this series were done well again such as the visuals, and in the more recent ones the sound. I am extremely pumped for the final session, just how will the story finally end? Here is my review.

The visuals were pretty good. You havent changed your animating style too much, but i think this was for the best. Since they also havent improved a whole lot since the voice acting became a part of the series, i couldnt keep giving the visuals a perfect 10. The drawings were still awesome, your characters all look very different and some are extremely cool. The backgrounds have always been fairly simple with your guys' submissions and in the future i would like to see them more complex in detail. The colours were good, everything you used looked pretty nice together. The animation was great as always, smooth and the fight scenes looked good.

The style was excellent. As i said before you summarized the whole series up quite nicely in this session. And you also set up everything perfectly for the very last session. The characters personalities are all very noticable, it is very clear you put a whole lot of effort into their development. The story was excellent. The plot is very serious, and you would never imagine all of these occurances to happen around the community of one school. You basically took two very different and unrelated things and made them work amazingly together. And now the last session is all that remains after all of this, i can not wait.

The sound was also very well done. The sound effects were superb. They were perfectly in sync and very cool for the most part. The pieces of music all helped create a very atmospheric mood within the school. The voice acting was probably my favourite part about this aspect, all of them were done very well.

Overall this was an amazing story animated to almost the utmost perfection. I couldnt be more pleased with how this series has come along. I remember the early episodes as just being good, but the more recent ones have gone above and beyond what i would have expected before. Anyways congrats on such success up until this point and i cant wait for Session 18!
-Standing Ovation! 5/5

[Prelude to Joy III]

Way to go Zekey And BlueHippo!!

Another great movie from you two, honestly i think you two as a combination are quite creative and you definitely can be very funny when you want to be. Even with some of your lesser submissions (ie the collabs) i can manage to enjoy your unique sense of humour. This was obviously one of your more random submissions, even if you have quite a few of them. This animation showed that you like to have a lot of fun as artists but also do a great job with it too. So really nice work on it, here is my review.

The visuals were definitely some of Zekey's best. The anmating style wasnt quite as varied as id expect them to be in a submission full of random short animations. But there were some changes, and when those happened it made those clips very fun. The general animating style was also good by itself, definitely remenicent of your other movies. The drawings were great, i still love all of your extremely weird looking characters. The colours also complemented these drawings quite nicely. Then finally, the actual animation was very smooth as it always is with your stuff.

The style, in this case, was my favourite aspect but not by a long shot. Of course the animating style was very good for both the visuals and this aspect. I always love the slight randomness in your submissions and in this particular movie you had a lot more of it. This submission also seemed to be about pure fun; fun for your guys to make it and definitely fun for all the viewers. The variety in the content of all the clips was pretty good, they were always different from one to the next. I would have liked to see one or two of them with both The lizard and the Hippo themselves!

The sound was great, including the one clips where it kind of spammed a little bit. That part was actually very funny. But there were some voice clips and maybe some voice acting, all of which worked well with everything else. The sound effects were good for the random style of this movie, and by that i mean a little over the top. When the plain crashed for example. Great music selection as well.

Overall this was a funny movie with impressive visuals and a spectacular style with them. I could not really ask for more, just a little more effort in each of the aspects and i can see its 4.00 becoming something more like a 4.15-4.20. Anyways good work for now, i want to see more!
- Two Thumbs Way up! 5/5

[Time Squad [Part 2]]

Awesome! Cant get enough of Blockhead!

This was simply fantastic, i think this is definitely your best submission yet. It was certainly longer, so we were able to enjoy the humour for much longer. The humour itself was better than from what i can remember and Blockhead has never been funnier himself. This was not only funny, but every aspect was actually done exceptionally. I definitely like the idea of going through time and the fact that almost anything you do messes up something in the future. Since they are traveling through time the viewers get to see multiple different settings and i think the more settings there are the more the author can use their creativity. Here is my review.

The visuals were obviously quite impressive. In my opinion theses show off your best demonstration of graphics so far compared to any other of your submissions. The characters looked great physically, very detailed and all very distinguishable. I was extremely impressed with the backgrounds during some scenes, like when they just escaped from the volcanoe. It seems you have put in quite a lot more effort! The animation was also very good. While it wasnt always simply beautiful, it did its job very well. I liked the running animation. It was the same for every character and just looked kind of "dopey" in a good way.

The style was excellent too. If Blockhead acts as he is supposed to, you will always get a great score for this aspect. The animating style was good, pretty original especially within Blockhead's character. All of the characters are really distinguishable, not only in their appearance. All of them are quirky and rather memorable. The idea and presentation of this episode were fantastic. The length goes with the presentation, the longer this is the more Blockhead we get! The style of humour is just what id want, if not more, in a submission with a host of characters like this.

The sound was unexpectedly good. Certainly the best sounding of any of you submissions i would say. The voices were awesome, some were very cool, and others were just comical. Saying some of the things they did must have been difficult to do without laughing. The sound effects and music selections were amazing as well!

Overall this was an absolutely hilarious movie that should pretty much be watched my anyone looking for a good laugh backed up by impressive visuals. I can only hope the next episode will be just as good if not better. Awesome work!
-Standing Ovation! 5/5

[the YuYu]

What can I say? Excellent work yet again!

You still have yet to fail to simply amaze me with one of your submissions to Newgrounds. I still believe that you are the most talented flash artist on the entire site, and quite possibly even all the sites that host flash that i have visited before. Of course, the Bitey series is one of the best on Newgrounds, if not its the best depending on what kind of stuff you like to watch. This one was surely not something similar to what you usually do. This was purely "an action sequence" as you called it, while your other movies may have a bit of action, but are usually based around some sort of simple story or problem that Bitey finds himself in. Either that or they are telling a story by itself, for example Hitchhiker. Since this was different i suppose it was a bit of a risk, but you certainly pulled it off. Here is my review.

The visuals....absolutely incredible. This is one of the main things that got you totally famous as an artist. I think this is what many people still know you best for. They were as close to flawless as i have ever seen flash graphics come. The drawings of everything were awesome. From what you ended your last submission i would have thought the YuYu were much bigger. But they still looked really scary and at the same time very interesting. I loved how they sort of resembled a dark shadow. Bitey of course looked great as always. The colours were perfect to show that it was nightime, you always do a great job of sunsets, afternoon, morning and nighttime, showing what time of day it is basically. The backgrounds were fantastic, i have always loved the Brackenwood scenery, its always different but still resembles this mysterious planet. The animation was also extremely well done. The cloud of the YuYu looked very smooth as it chased after Bitey. And you did a great job of making everything seem very fast paced and exciting.

The style was also deserving of a perfect 10. Although i think i prefer the styles of your more story based flash movies, this one was still great, but in another way. As i said, this one was purely action, it was a good way to change things up with your fans. As always the animating style was mind blowing, you have your very own artistic style that i think many people want to be able to do. Its always fun to see continuations, because it makes the plot in the second part much more interesting. The action was definitely fast paced, it was also a bit intense to an extent. But even with all of this, you managed to keep this installment true to the rest of the series. The idea was great and the presentation was fantastic. I can not pick out a single flaw in this aspect.

The sound was not quite as indepth as it usually is, but i still enjoyed it quite a bit. I can see why you loved this song so much for an introduction that you had to make a longer movie showcasing the song. It would have been nice to hear some other sound effects along with the song, but since you used the song so well i couldnt help but love the sound anyways.

Overall this was yet another excellent submission from you. It was worth the wait since your last submission, and i hope i will be able to feel the same way as your upcoming submission. Keep the quality of the visuals high, keep coming with as much humour as littleFoot had, and keep on coming with the amazing sounds andmusic you have been using so far. Congrats!
-Standing Ovation! 5/5

chluaid responds:

Hey Chris! thanks a lot for the in-depth review man.. very much appreciated.

With regards to the point you made about the sound, I totally agree that more sound effects would have been nice. After adding some major sound effects at key points in the movie though (wind and waterfall), the file size was already too high and I didn't wanna push it. When I put this movie on DVD, I will probably add quite a bit more sound to really deepen the audio experience :)

On your point about action vs my usual sprawling atmospheric style, I have always wanted to do a complete action movie, but it has always been quite daunting knowing that there is so much more pencil mileage involved. Even after making this relatively short movie, my entire arm from shoulder to wrist is still recovering. This is because at 30fps, there are (*quick calculation*) well over 10,000 individual drawings of Bitey, YuYu and backgrounds in those 3 minutes. So while I've always wanted to do full-on action, the sweeping beauty shots and limited movement are more practical (at least for as long as I'm working alone).

Thanks once again for taking the time to review so thoroughly. *bows*

-chlu